Farewell to artist Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Japanese but Italian by adoption

Japanese artist Hidetoshi Nagasawa, who had been active in Italy for a very long time, passed away yesterday in Milan after an illness that had plagued him for a year. He was born in 1940 in Tonei, a village in Manchuria, a region that was then an independent state in Japan’s orbit.

He had studied architecture and interior design in Tokyo: graduating in 1963, he worked for some time as an architect to which he added the profession of artist, active mainly in the field of performance art. He left Japan at the age of twenty-six and embarked on a bicycle journey that took him around the world to several countries: however, he stopped in Italy in 1967 because, as he liked to recount, his bicycle was stolen in Brindisi, and the episode represented the symbolic end of his journey. He therefore settled in 1968 in Milan, where he had relationships with the greatest artists of the time, including Enrico Castellani and Antonio Trotta. In 1978 he founded the “Casa degli Artisti,” together with Jole de Sanna, Luciano Fabro and others. He first exhibited in 1969 at the Sincron Gallery in Brescia and, in the same years, began to produce sculptures and environments, many of which were later permanently installed in various cities in Italy and beyond (among them, the famous Tea House Garden of the Palazzo Pretorio in Certaldo).

Nagasawa went on to exhibit several times at the Venice Biennale, once at Documenta (in 1992) and in many Italian and international museums. Nagasawa was also a teacher: he held the chair of sculpture at the New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. His last exhibition was “Floating” held last year at the Adalberto Catanzaro Gallery in Bagheria, Sicily, curated by Bruno Corà. The central themes of his works were sensitivity to nature, respect for the quality of materials (from paper to wood, stone to metal) and reflection on the complex relationship between East and West, present and past.

Pictured: Hidetoshi Nagasawa in 2013. Ph. Giorgio Benni

Farewell to artist Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Japanese but Italian by adoption

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.